Estimating the Proportion of Health-Related Websites Disclosing
Information That Can Be Used to Assess Their Quality

Final Report - May 30, 2006

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge Hitwise—Real-Time Competitive Intelligence (www.hitwise.com),
which provided the data on Internet traffic to health-related websites from which we generated
the sample for our analysis, and Mark Mazzacano, Senior Business Development Manager at Hitwise
USA, Inc., for his valuable assistance.

We also wish to acknowledge the contribution of the many other members of the MPR project team not
listed on the cover page of this report: Julie Ladinsky helped us think through the review process,
draft the protocols, and conduct the pretest. Lisa Trebino undertook the arduous task of reviewing,
with care and diligence, over 50 health websites. Mary Laschober pitched in to help us analyze the data
we collected and critically reviewed our reported findings. John Hall and Janice Ballou critically reviewed
our proposed sampling options and review protocols, and Yuhong Zheng helped generate the subsamples we used
for data collection. Eileen Curley formatted and produced all of our reports, including this one, and Jane
Retter, Leah Hackelman, and Walt Brower edited them.

Above all, we wish to thank Cynthia Baur, our project officer at the Office of Disease Prevention and
Health Promotion, for her timely help, guidance, and patience throughout this project, as, together,
we worked through difficult questions of interpretation and judgment.